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From Our Own Correspondent
Whatever Happened to the War Song?
00:28:06
Back in the days of the Vietnam War the airwaves were full of protest songs...
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- [00:00]
Jeremy Bowen
Hello from the from our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:12]
Programme Host
Hello Today, was it worth it? Reflections on war from our man in Syria, Iraq, Libya and this week, Gaza. And from the defence correspondent earlier in Afghanistan and this week writing a final dispatch after seven years in the job, like blowing out a candle in a dark room. Emigration once again taking a toll on country life in Ireland and back to war again. Where's today's blowing in the wind. We're in Nashville, Tennessee, wondering whatever happened to the war song. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, is on his way to the Middle east to try to broker a truce between Israel and the Hamas authorities in Gaza. Thousands of Israeli troops backed by tanks, helicopters and artillery fire, are continuing a major ground operation inside the Gaza Strip, the first in more than five years. The Israelis say their military operation is designed to destroy tunnels used by Hamas militants to store rockets. Jeremy Bowen spent much of this week in Gaza and considers how the latest developments will affect the wider region.
- [01:21]
Jeremy Bowen
I traveled to Gaza from Baghdad. Before that I was in Syria, in Aleppo and Damascus. It made me ponder about the wrong turn I must have made about 30 years ago to have such a sweaty, violent timetable. But it also made one vital fact about the Middle east impossible to avoid. It's on fire in some places, literally almost everywhere. Politically, I haven't seen anything like it since the first time the BBC sent me to the region after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. I didn't imagine in Saudi Arabia, 30 years old and with a full head of hair, that I'd still be reporting on some of the consequences of those events a long time later. In 1990, it was a world crisis which changed the region. It helped kick start the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis a few years later. And you can also draw a direct line from the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to the catastrophic decision in 2003 to invade Iraq by President George W. Bush, assisted by Tony Blair, and continue that line right up to the new war in Iraq this year. All sorts of other factors matter too, in the current conflagration. The Arab uprisings of 2011 started a process of change that will last for a generation or more before it settles down. It's too early to say where it's going, but right now the Middle east is not coasting down the primrose road to liberal democracy. Radical Islam is increasingly attractive to some, especially young men who don't get the answers they want anywhere else. Ruling elites are often corrupt, incompetent, or both. Western interference has generally made matters worse. Across the Middle east, populations have risen extraordinarily fast. The problem with having so many children is that economies in the region are not strong or flexible enough to provide them with jobs, health care, and to pay for their education. Gaza's economy is definitely not able to support a population of 1.7 million people, but that's because of the siege imposed by Israel and Egypt. So while that crisis over Iraq, Kuwait, the 1991 invasion and its consequences was big, the scale of what's happening now dwarfs it. The wars in Syria and Iraq are increasingly hard to separate. Isis, which now calls itself the Islamic State, is leading what could become a charge to change the borders of the Middle east, as laid down by Britain and France in 1916. All the neighbors of Iraq and Syria can feel the pressure of their wars. Egypt has a new military backed regime and a new jihadi insurgency. Libya has been crumbling since before Colonel Gaddafi was killed, and now it's sliding into another civil war. It's rushing headlong into becoming a fully fledged failed state. And that's just a partial list. And there's been a reminder in the last few days of the terrible potency of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It hasn't troubled headline writers too much since 2011, when crowds in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria turned against their leaders. But the new war in Gaza shows how the Palestinian Israeli conflict still has resonance across the world as well as in the region. People care about it, get angry about it in a way that they don't about other crises and wars. I'm calling what's happening in Gaza a war, though I'm aware that it perhaps is not a perfect description. Some people have even told me I shouldn't use the word because of the enormous imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians. I disagree. Wars are increasingly fought between the strong and the weak. By the way, it's wrong to pretend that there's any kind of equality between what Israeli citizens are going through and and the experience of Palestinians. The trauma of Israelis caught up in Hamas attacks is unquestionable, but the trauma in Gaza is of an utterly different degree. The only long term way to end this chronic killing is through a permanent settlement of the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. It has to be one both sides can tolerate. An imposed peace would just contain the seeds of the next war. But at the moment, peace is not conceivable. Even a long term Absence of war is unattainable. What's the alternative if nothing changes more and more of these mini wars which will eventually become major wars?
- [06:14]
Programme Host
Jeremy Bowen. So the news this week has once again been dominated by war and its consequences, from the conflict in Gaza to the Malaysian plane brought down in Ukraine and the legacy of the massacre at Srebrenica, which a court case brought back into the headlines. In Iraq, the fight back has begun against Sunni extremists who have declared a caliphate across large swathes of the north and into Syria. Amid all that, the death of 42 Afghans in a bombing and gun battles near Kabul Airport barely even registered here. Given the urgency of the news elsewhere, Caroline Wyatt's spell as BBC defence correspondent ended yesterday after seven years. She'll be going on to report on religion. But this morning she looks back at Britain's wars and what they've meant.
- [07:04]
Caroline Wyatt
We are good as a nation at remembrance. Every year on Armistice Day, we observe a minute's silence. And this year there will be many more moments of quiet reflection as we mark 100 years since the outbreak of the First World War, the war to end all wars. Except, of course, that it didn't. The Imperial War Museum in London reopened this Thursday with a spectacular new atrium and a sombre display about the Great War, complete with the sound of the guns and soldiers. Poignant letters home. On a plaque, a quotation from the late Harry Patch, the last veteran of the First World War. I've tried for 80 years to forget it, but I can't. Yet. What no exhibition can give is the heady mix of fear and adrenaline in war, the heightening of the senses and the exhilaration if you survive. The rocket that lands nearby or the bullet that narrowly misses. The camaraderie between the bands of brothers who set off to war in 1914 shines out from the black and white photos of the smiling young men. By 1918, there were fewer smiles and far fewer young men. Looking at their faces, I wondered what, in a hundred years time, the war museums will make of our generation's wars. From the Middle east to Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Kosovo, and still Afghanistan. That's almost a forgotten war, and it hasn't even finished yet. As Britain's combat mission in Afghanistan draws towards a close, it's not clear how the story will end, nor how history will judge it. So many have paid a heavy price from those who fought and died to the families back at home whose sons and husbands and sometimes daughters, did not return in the warmth of a summer evening in A garden filled with the heavy scent of roses. I talked to a mother who lost her son in Helmand. Was the war worth it? She asked. What did my son's death achieve? The conflict took not just her son, but the possibility of his children, and their children too, just as it has done for countless civilians in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't know the answer, or what the war meant for those who must live with their wounds. But I know I won't forget the field hospital at camp bastion in 2009, filling each day with young men in the twilight between life and death. Nor the military surgeon listing in a matter of fact way the number of limbs she'd had to amputate that month with a look in her eyes that suggested she'd seen too much of war. So many fought long and hard, and at such cost for places whose names are already slipping from memory, although the regimental silver has them engraved for the generations to come. Nausad, Sangin or Musagala. Dusty towns whose fate mattered so much at the time. The confident statement made on camera always said progress was being made. Yet at least once with the microphone off, I heard we'd look back one day on the charge up the Helmond river valley as our forebearers looked on the charge of the light Brigade in 1854. There is a matter of factness about those whose business is war. British forces are volunteers, and those who fought in all these wars signed up in the knowledge and some the hope that there would be war, a chance to test themselves and their mettle and see how they measured up. Back at the museum, one British officer thought long and hard on what's been achieved in Afghanistan. We created time and space for the Afghans to do what they needed to do. We just have to make sure we don't abandon them now. Another wondered what more could be done to take responsibility for the mistakes and failures in Britain's recent wars, not just by politicians, but senior officers too. Otherwise, how will we fare in the next? Maybe not now for a nation both weary and wary of foreign wars, but there will be a next war. There's another plaque at the Imperial War Museum with a quotation from Georges Clemenceau, the then French Prime Minister, on the treaty that ended the First World War and helped lead to the Second. Above all else, he said, it is the work of human beings, and as a result it is not perfect. But we did what we could to work fast and well.
- [11:07]
Programme Host
And that was Caroline Wyatt. The gathering crisis in Iraq has seen a storm of soul searching on the American networks more than a decade after US Troops marched into Baghdad, the pundits are waiting to see if the city falls to the Sunni militants of ISIS while recalling the fall of Saigon nearly 40 years ago now. Back then, the United States was awash with art, writing and music that reflected the feverish political atmosphere of the time. Composers from various branches, like rock's Jimi Hendrix and country's Kenny Rogers, were writing protest songs about war. But where are the war songs now? As you've been hearing on this program, there's no shortage of conflicts to provide inspiration. Humphrey Hawksley's been off in search of them in America's music heartland.
- [11:56]
Humphrey Hawksley
The Deep South A massive neon light shaped like a guitar protrudes from a building along the Broadway in Nashville, Tennessee. Underneath, bathed in the flashing blue lamp of a delivery truck, a street singer with a stubbled beard and black T shirt plays a familiar song that I can't quite place. It's not me that started that crazy Asian war, he sings to a small circle of passersby, but I was proud to go do my patriotic chore. I put some dollars in his tip jar. What's the song? I ask. Kenny Rogers, 1969. His eyes gleam with enthusiasm. It's so tragic. A Vietnam vet gets crippled back home, he watches his girlfriend dress up to go out on the town. While he has to stay in, he pleads with a ruby, don't take your love to town. That's the name of the song. Iraq. And the spectre of Baghdad's collapse is filling the airwaves. There are headlines about the struggle of troops returning home from battles overseas. Forty years ago, with America's attempt to democratize Vietnam, failing protest movements swept the country, led by young musicians like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez. Nashville is known as America's music city, and the Broadway is the main road, flanked by neon decorated bars with names like Whiskey Bent, Tin Roof and Legends. Bands hoping for the big break play from cramped stages, their raw music spilling out into the humid night. It's a place where Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn meets Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, and where musicians have drawn inspiration from issues of poverty, inequality and race and, of course, war. But where's the war music now? We're not writing any of that stuff, says the heavily bearded Stephen Molaire of the relentless mules as they pack up after a set. The mule was the work animal of the cotton plantations, and with a banjo, mandolin and resonator guitar, they play a style called bluegrass. It's just not commercial anymore, he adds. Further along, Jim Hayden, a jazz singer with the geeky, bespectacled look of Buddy Holly, agrees. People don't seem to want it. But maybe. He pauses, hesitant on what he's about to say. Go on, I nudge. You know, we have the Patriot act over here, and people remember how the FBI tracked John Lennon for his anti war songs and then he got shot. He tails off, embarrassed at his own conspiracy theory. Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen have done stuff, but they're dinosaurs. I don't know. Music against the war is being unpatriotic, and people don't want that. Earlier, I'd asked the same question in the small town of Tupelo in Mississippi, where American flags fly from lampposts and where Elvis Presley was born in 1935 and grew up in a two room clapboard shack. The mayor, 38 year old Jason Shelton, lived in the same poor part of town and went to Elvis's old school. He described how Elvis's childhood experience of race and poverty helped him take music to a new level. But your question about songs from these wars, he said. Nothing really comes to mind. He gets out his iPad and logs onto his Facebook page. But let's see, I'll send a message and ask around. While in Nashville that evening, there's a response to the mayor's message from Darby McCullough, an Iraq veteran who has a band called Dry County Tragedy. He sends me a rough recording of a song he's just written, a tribute to his best friend killed by a roadside bomb. It has a slow, haunting melody. You never thought this old world would turn out so cruel, goes one line and describing coming back from the war. You wake up screaming. Yesterday a hero. Yesterday is gone. All that hero hype, says Darby when I call him. All those medals. For what? Are there any other songs? I ask. There's got to be, but I don't know them, he replies. Young folks today are all on their phones and computers, and you don't get music from that. A colorful sculptor emblazoned with the faces of legendary singers marks one end of the Broadway where a guitarist who must have been in his 70s plays an old Joan Baez song. Those protest issues ain't solved, he says. When I ask him, his wonderfully alive, craggy and layered face breaks into an upbeat smile. But there'll be someone out there who's writing a song about these wars. It'll be from their soul, and suddenly the song will be there. And it'll take us all by storm.
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Programme Host
Humphrey Hawksley in Nashville the economy in Ireland might be gradually picking up, but so far there's been no dip in the number of people leaving the country in search of better opportunities overseas. Last year, 250 people emigrated from Ireland every day, most of them men and women in their 20s and 30s. It reminded many of the darkest period in Irish history, back in the 1840s, when a million people emigrated from Ireland to escape starvation and disease. John Murphy says the effects of this new exodus are most evident away from the cities, in places like Achill Island.
- [17:21]
John Murphy
Regan's Pub has gone. Paddy Jordan's is gone. The one across from the station has gone. Nicola speaks quietly as she carefully pours a pint of the black stuff and paints a picture of business decline. Two note three hotels have gone into receivership, she adds. Nicholas, 26 years old and has completed her BA degree in Heritage studies. She came back to Ballinar in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland because her mother was having an operation, but she plans to leave again soon, in her case meandering along canals in a boat called Rum Doodle. Aren't you putting off the inevitable when you have to find a proper job? I ask. I guess so, she says. But there's nothing here. She says she didn't really notice until she came back from her studies that half her friends were gone, and she doesn't expect many of them to come back. Hundreds of thousands of young Irish people have left the country in search of work, and many others have moved to cities like Dublin and Cork to get jobs. The result's been a stripping out of rural communities like those on Achill island, about an hour's drive from Ballinar in the far west of Mayo. Achill is Ireland's largest island, linked to the mainland by a short bridge. Under it, the tide scrambles in and out every few hours when the sun shines. Achill is beautiful. Peat bogs spread over much of the center of the island. Around the edges, the rocky shore, cliffs and beaches challenge the Atlantic Ocean to do its worst. The winter months can be bleak here. No doubt the black faced sheep that clamber across the hills could tell a weather related story OR 2. Maybe that's what all the Barbain is about. I imagine the rounded hills guarding the island. To me at least one of them looks like a curled up sleeping bloodhound, and the sharpened tooth shape of Slieve Moor, Gaelic for big mountain, keeps a watchful eye from the north shore. Yet, as the Irish would say, you can't eat scenery A teacher tells me we're educating our young people to emigrate. A whopping 94% of secondary school leavers on Achill go on to university level education off the island. Of course, it's the highest figure of any parish in Ireland. Then they have to leave altogether to find work. Some may come back in the summer months when the short tourist season is at its peak, or to help cut the peat turf, as they call it here. Another reason to come back is sport, like the members of the local Gaelic football club who return from across Ireland each weekend for Friday night training and a match on Saturday. But the club has lost 20 players, more than a team's worth, to emigration in the last few years. It can be a struggle to get a full senior squad together for one important match. Last season, Achill was so short of players that two flew back from the UK and one from Sweden to make up the numbers. But the haemorrhaging of players led to relegation. They'd been on the verge of promotion, the manager Paul McNamara tells me. Instead, we lost players. This isn't just about emigration, he adds, it's about rural depopulation and no one's doing anything about it. One of the local primary schools, the Valley National School, which has been celebrating its centenary this year, has just 15 pupils. In September we'll go down to 12 and we'll become a single teacher school. The headmaster come only teacher, Dennis Randall says. He worries about the future and says that if services, especially the schools, are stripped out of an area, young families won't come back even if they want to. He expects his school to close in the next four years. He says it'll be like blowing out a candle in an already dark room. On the Sunday afternoon after a long night in the pub celebrating their hard fought victory against another struggling club, the Achille Gaelic football players are back on the pitch. Soccer this time, sport is like a glue for society on the island. Or as the chairman of the soccer club, Sean Molloy, puts it, the only thing that's bringing the people back is the Sport. In his 28 years working as a DJ on Achilles, he says he's never seen it this quiet. He argues that as long as the players return regularly, there's a chance of them coming back to live on the island. But Sean says if they have no reason to come back, then there's no reason to come back ever.
- [21:56]
Programme Host
John Murphy in the far west of Ireland. Next stop, it's New York, as they say out there on Achill Island. Now, some I Guess on this sultry Saturday morning will be heading off for a swim. Perhaps you've already had a cooling dip in the sea. Or a pool. It's an activity that many in the Indian capital, Delhi can only dream about. And it's sweltering there. Temperatures have been hitting 40 regularly now for weeks. That's 104 in Fahrenheit. So for many deliites, including our Anu Anand, keeping cool is a top priority. And that's no easy task when acquiring membership to the only nearby public swimming pool takes dedication, perseverance and an early morning wake up call.
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Anu Anand
It's hot in Delhi. So hot my bathroom is a permanent sauna. So hot that a giant scented candle I left on the terrace has dissolved into goo. So hot that water, even from the cold tap, comes out steaming. Sadly, there are few public places you can go for relief from the heat. So when a friend suggested that we join the government run sports complex featuring an Olympic sized swimming pool, I jumped at the chance. A three month membership costs less than a meal at one of Delhi's swanky restaurants. But getting the membership is an Olympic feat in itself. To succeed, you must have the stamina to beat hundreds of rivals on the one day each month that membership is thrown open to the public. So on the last Monday of June, my husband and I left home. Just before 5am Under a crescent moon, we drove through Delhi's normally loud, teeming streets. But as we approached the high locked gates of the sports complex, hundreds of people had already beaten us to it. There was no queue. There rarely is in India. Instead, an angry crowd thronged the gate, yelling at the security guards on the other side. At issue was an unofficial list drawn up by the crowd. People had been adding their names to it since 10pm the night before. So great is the competition for membership that people wanted to be sure they'd gain entry in the order their names appeared on the list. But the guards were refusing to honor it. Exploiting the divisions, latecomers were passionately questioning the list's legitimacy. There's no procedure, people shouted. They do it differently every time, one man complained. Sometimes they follow the list, sometimes they don't. About an hour into this ordeal, an older gentleman appeared addressing the crowd through the gates. Of course, with all the noise, no one actually heard what he said, but he was apparently the retired colonel in charge of the membership process. Shortly afterwards, the guards did use the disputed list, but only to admit 100 people through the gates instead of the usual 400. And without any explanation, people began Screaming, some tried to push their way through the gate. Others tried to squeeze through the gaps in the bars. The crowd turned on an older lady who'd arrived to relieve her driver, who'd been holding her place in the queue. She protested, how can I queue for hours when I have trouble standing? But was shown little mercy. Finally, fearing a riot, the authorities decided to let everyone file into the basketball court, promising membership applications to all. At this point, you might be wondering, why such chaos just to join a swimming pool? Well, there are lots of reasons. India is an overpopulated country. Delhi alone is a city of 25 million, according to the latest UN figures. Combative queuing is a national sport here, given the scarcity of schools, homes, toilets and hospital beds. There's also what one professor memorably described to me as the economics of scarcity. In other words, create artificial shortages and then make access to them unfair and opaque. And those in charge benefit, as do those with connections. You can be sure that every one of New Delhi's elite citizens already has a permanent membership to the sports complex, India's creme de la creme collect privilege like others collect air miles only most rarely use the pool, as one woman in the queue whose father has access admitted. So how did we fare? Well, after seven hours in the queue, a staff tea break, several vicious shouting matches and a standoff with an official who tried to boot us from the queue, we got. Oh no, not an actual membership. That would be far too easy. We got an application form. And it's only right to admit that we did queue jump, but only because we were behind about 100 people who arrived after us. You've adopted Indian habits, one man shouted. You wouldn't jump the queue in your country. Well, if that's the case, you should congratulate us, my husband said, standing his ground at around midday, bleary eyed and drenched in sweat, I was finally clutching a badly photocopied application form, personally stamped and signed by the retired colonel, our ticket to a membership, and the cool waters of the swimming pool we got off lightly. I heard of broken bones and times that the police had to be called in. A few days later, coveted membership cards in hand, we giddily packed our things and drove to the pool, ecstatic at the idea of a cooling swim. On arrival, we were told the pool was closed every day from 10am to 3pm probably for those elite permanent members who never bother to come.
- [27:54]
Programme Host
Anu Anand dying for a dip in Delhi and bringing this edition to a close. There'll be another collection of dispatches from reporters around the world next Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.